Rebecca
Page 28
"There was no chance," said Frank. "All those people. Of course I saw, don't you think I know Maxim well enough for that? Look here..."
"I don't blame him," I interrupted. "If he believes I played that vile hideous joke he has a right to think what he likes of me, and never talk to me again, never see me again."
"You mustn't talk like that," said Frank. "You don't know what you're saying. Let me come up and see you. I think I can explain."
What was the use of Frank coming to see me, and us sitting in the morning room together, Frank smoothing me down, Frank being tactful, Frank being kind? I did not want kindness from anybody now. It was too late.
"No," I said. "No, I don't want to go over it and over it again. It's happened, it can't be altered now. Perhaps it's a good thing; it's made me realize something I ought to have known before, that I ought to have suspected when I married Maxim."
"What do you mean?" said Frank.
His voice was sharp, queer. I wondered why it should matter to him about Maxim not loving me. Why did he not want me to know?
"About him and Rebecca," I said, and as I said her name it sounded strange and sour like a forbidden word, a relief to me no longer, not a pleasure, but hot and shaming as a sin confessed.
Frank did not answer for a moment. I heard him draw in his breath at the other end of the wire.
"What do you mean?" he said again, shorter and sharper than before. "What do you mean?"
"He doesn't love me, he loves Rebecca," I said. "He's never forgotten her, he thinks about her still, night and day. He's never loved me, Frank. It's always Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca."
I heard Frank give a startled cry but I did not care how much I shocked him now. "Now you know how I feel," I said, "now you understand."
"Look here," he said; "I've got to come and see you, I've got to, do you hear? It's vitally important; I can't talk to you down the telephone. Mrs. de Winter? Mrs. de Winter?"
I slammed down the receiver, and got up from the writing desk. I did not want to see Frank. He could not help me over this. No one could help me but myself. My face was red and blotchy from crying. I walked about the room biting the corner of my handkerchief, tearing at the edge.
The feeling was strong within me that I should never see Maxim again. It was certainty, born of some strange instinct. He had gone away and would not come back. I knew in my heart that Frank believed this too and would not admit it to me on the telephone. He did not want to frighten me. If I rang him up again at the office now I should find that he had gone. The clerk would say, "Mr. Crawley has just gone out, Mrs. de Winter," and I could see Frank, hatless, climbing into his small, shabby Morris, driving off in search of Maxim.
I went and stared out of the window at the little clearing where the satyr played his pipes. The rhododendrons were all over now. They would not bloom again for another year. The tall shrubs looked dark and drab now that the color had gone. A fog was rolling up from the sea, and I could not see the woods beyond the bank. It was very hot, very oppressive. I could imagine our guests of last night saying to one another, "What a good thing this fog kept off for yesterday, we should never have seen the fireworks." I went out of the morning room and through the drawing room to the terrace. The sun had gone in now behind a wall of mist. It was as though a blight had fallen upon Manderley taking the sky away and the light of the day. One of the gardeners passed me with a barrow full of bits of paper, and litter, and the skins of fruit left on the lawns by the people last night.
"Good morning," I said.
"Good morning, Madam."
"I'm afraid the ball last night has made a lot of work for you," I said.
"That's all right, Madam," he said. "I think everyone enjoyed themselves good and hearty, and that's the main thing, isn't it?"
"Yes, I suppose so," I said.
He looked across the lawns to the clearing in the woods where the valley sloped to the sea. The dark trees loomed thin and indistinct.
"It's coming up very thick," he said.
"Yes," I said.
"A good thing it wasn't like this last night," he said.
"Yes," I said.
He waited a moment, and then he touched his cap and went off trundling his barrow. I went across the lawns to the edge of the woods. The mist in the trees had turned to moisture and dripped upon my bare head like a thin rain. Jasper stood by my feet dejected, his tail downcast, his pink tongue hanging from his mouth. The clammy oppression of the day made him listless and heavy. I could hear the sea from where I stood, sullen and slow, as it broke in the coves below the woods. The white fog rolled on past me towards the house smelling of damp salt and seaweed. I put my hand on Jasper's coat. It was wringing wet. When I looked back at the house I could not see the chimneys or the contour of the walls, I could only see the vague substance of the house, the windows in the west wing, and the flower tubs on the terrace. The shutter had been pulled aside from the window of the large bedroom in the west wing, and someone was standing there, looking down upon the lawns. The figure was shadowy and indistinct and for one moment of shock and fear I believed it to be Maxim. Then the figure moved, I saw the arm reach up to fold the shutter, and I knew it was Mrs. Danvers. She had been watching me as I stood at the edge of the woods bathed in that white wall of fog. She had seen me walk slowly from the terrace to the lawns. She may have listened to my conversation with Frank on the telephone from the connecting line in her own room. She would know that Maxim had not been with me last night. She would have heard my voice, known about my tears. She knew the part I had played through the long hours, standing by Maxim's side in my blue dress at the bottom of the stairs, and that he had not looked at me nor spoken to me. She knew because she had meant it to happen. This was her triumph, hers and Rebecca's.
I thought of her as I had seen her last night, watching me through the open door to the west wing, and that diabolical smile on her white skull's face, and I remembered that she was a living breathing woman like myself, she was made of flesh and blood. She was not dead, like Rebecca. I could speak to her, but I could not speak to Rebecca.
I walked back across the lawns on sudden impulse to the house. I went through the hall and up the great stairs, I turned in under the archway by the gallery, I passed through the door to the west wing, and so along the dark silent corridor to Rebecca's room. I turned the handle of the door and went inside.
Mrs. Danvers was still standing by the window, and the shutter was folded back.
"Mrs. Danvers," I said. "Mrs. Danvers." She turned to look at me, and I saw her eyes were red and swollen with crying, even as mine were, and there were dark shadows in her white face.
"What is it?" she said, and her voice was thick and muffled from the tears she had shed, even as mine had been.
I had not expected to find her so. I had pictured her smiling as she had smiled last night, cruel and evil. Now she was none of these things, she was an old woman who was ill and tired.
I hesitated, my hand still on the knob of the open door, and I did not know what to say to her now or what to do.
She went on staring at me with those red, swollen eyes and I could not answer her. "I left the menu on the desk as usual," she said. "Do you want something changed?" Her words gave me courage, and I left the door and came to the middle of the room.
"Mrs. Danvers," I said. "I have not come to talk about the menu. You know that, don't you?"
She did not answer me. Her left hand opened and shut.
"You've done what you wanted, haven't you?" I said, "you meant this to happen, didn't you? Are you pleased now? Are you happy?"
She turned her head away, and looked out of the window as she had done when I first came into the room. "Why did you ever come here?" she said. "Nobody wanted you at Manderley. We were all right until you came. Why did you not stay where you were out in France?"
"You seem to forget I love Mr. de Winter," I said.
"If you loved him you would never have married him," she said.
"I thought I hated you but I don't now," she said; "it seems to have spent itself, all the feeling I had."
"Why should you hate me?" I asked; "what have I ever done to you that you should hate me?"
"You tried to take Mrs. de Winter's place," she said.
Still she would not look at me. She stood there sullen, her head turned from me. "I had nothing changed," I said. "Manderley went on as it had always been. I gave no orders, I left everything to you. I would have been friends with you, if you had let me, but you set yourself against me from the first. I saw it in your face, the moment I shook hands with you."
She did not answer, and her hand kept opening and shutting against her dress. "Many people marry twice, men and women," I said. "There are thousands of second marriages taking place every day. You talk as though my marrying Mr. de Winter was a crime, a sacrilege against the dead. Haven't we as much right to be happy as anyone else?"
"Mr. de Winter is not happy," she said, turning to look at me at last; "any fool can see that. You have only to look at his eyes. He's still in hell, and he's looked like that ever since she died."
"It's not true," I said. "It's not true. He was happy when we were in France together; he was younger, much younger, and laughing and gay."
"Well, he's a man, isn't he?" she said. "No man denies himself on a honeymoon, does he? Mr. de Winter's not forty-six yet."
She laughed contemptuously, and shrugged her shoulders.
"How dare you speak to me like that? How dare you?" I said.
I was not afraid of her anymore. I went up to her, shook her by the arm. "You made me wear that dress last night," I said, "I should never have thought of it but for you. You did it because you wanted to hurt Mr. de Winter, you wanted to make him suffer. Hasn't he suffered enough without your playing that vile hideous joke upon him? Do you think his agony and pain will bring Mrs. de Winter back again?"
She shook herself clear of me, the angry color flooded her dead white face. "What do I care for his suffering?" she said, "he's never cared about mine. How do you think I've liked it, watching you sit in her place, walk in her footsteps, touch the things that were hers? What do you think it's meant to me all these months knowing that you wrote at her desk in the morning room, using the very pen that she used, speaking down the house telephone, where she used to speak every morning of her life to me, ever since she first came to Manderley? What do you think it meant to me to hear Frith and Robert and the rest of the servants talking about you as 'Mrs. de Winter'? 'Mrs. de Winter has gone out for a walk.' 'Mrs. de Winter wants the car this afternoon at three o'clock.' 'Mrs. de Winter won't be in to tea till five o'clock.' And all the while my Mrs. de Winter, my lady with her smile and her lovely face and brave ways, the real Mrs. de Winter, lying dead and cold and forgotten in the church crypt. If he suffers then he deserves to suffer, marrying a young girl like you not ten months afterwards. Well, he's paying for it now, isn't he? I've seen his face, I've seen his eyes. He's made his own hell and there's no one but himself to thank for it. He knows she sees him, he knows she comes by night and watches him. And she doesn't come kindly, not she, not my lady. She was never one to stand mute and still and be wronged. 'I'll see them in hell, Danny,' she'd say, 'I'll see them in hell first.' 'That's right, my dear,' I'd tell her, 'no one will put upon you. You were born into this world to take what you could out of it,' and she did, she didn't care, she wasn't afraid. She had all the courage and spirit of a boy, had my Mrs. de Winter. She ought to have been a boy, I often told her that. I had the care of her as a child. You knew that, didn't you?"
"No!" I said, "no. Mrs. Danvers, what's the use of all this? I don't want to hear any more, I don't want to know. Haven't I got feelings as well as you? Can't you understand what it means to me, to hear her mentioned, to stand here and listen while you tell me about her?"
She did not hear me, she went on raving like a mad woman, a fanatic, her long fingers twisting and tearing the black stuff of her dress.
"She was lovely then," she said. "Lovely as a picture; men turning to stare at her when she passed, and she not twelve years old. She knew then, she used to wink at me like the little devil she was. 'I'm going to be a beauty, aren't I, Danny?' she said, and 'We'll see about that, my love, we'll see about that,' I told her. She had all the knowledge then of a grown person; she'd enter into conversation with men and women as clever and full of tricks as someone of eighteen. She twisted her father round her little finger, and she'd have done the same with her mother, had she lived. Spirit, you couldn't beat my lady for spirit. She drove a four-in-hand on her fourteenth birthday, and her cousin, Mr. Jack, got up on the box beside her and tried to take the reins from her hands. They fought it out there together, for three minutes, like a couple of wild cats, and the horses galloping to glory. She won though, my lady won. She cracked her whip over his head and down he came, head-over-heels, cursing and laughing. They were a pair, I tell you, she and Mr. Jack. They sent him in the Navy, but he wouldn't stand the discipline, and I don't blame him. He had too much spirit to obey orders, like my lady."
I watched her, fascinated, horrified; a queer ecstatic smile was on her lips, making her older than ever, making her skull's face vivid and real. "No one got the better of her, never, never," she said. "She did what she liked, she lived as she liked. She had the strength of a little lion too. I remember her at sixteen getting up on one of her father's horses, a big brute of an animal too, that the groom said was too hot for her to ride. She stuck to him, all right. I can see her now, with her hair flying out behind her, slashing at him, drawing blood, digging the spurs into his side, and when she got off his back he was trembling all over, full of froth and blood. 'That will teach him, won't it, Danny?' she said, and walked off to wash her hands as cool as you please. And that's how she went at life, when she grew up. I saw her, I was with her. She cared for nothing and for no one. And then she was beaten in the end. But it wasn't a man, it wasn't a woman. The sea got her. The sea was too strong for her. The sea got her in the end."
She broke off, her mouth working strangely, and dragging at the corners. She began to cry noisily, harshly, her mouth open and her eyes dry.
"Mrs. Danvers," I said. "Mrs. Danvers." I stood before her helplessly, not knowing what to do. I mistrusted her no longer, I was afraid of her no more, but the sight of her sobbing there, dry-eyed, made me shudder, made me ill. "Mrs. Danvers," I said, "you're not well, you ought to be in bed. Why don't you go to your room and rest? Why don't you go to bed?"
She turned on me fiercely. "Leave me alone, can't you?" she said. "What's it to do with you if I show my grief? I'm not ashamed of it, I don't shut myself up in my room to cry. I don't walk up and down, up and down, in my room like Mr. de Winter, with the door locked on me."
"What do you mean?" I said. "Mr. de Winter does not do that."
"He did," she said, "after she died. Up and down, up and down in the library. I heard him. I watched him too, through the keyhole, more than once. Backwards and forwards, like an animal in a cage."
"I don't want to hear," I said. "I don't want to know."
"And then you say you made him happy on his honeymoon," she said; "made him happy--you, a young ignorant girl, young enough to be his daughter. What do you know about life? What do you know about men? You come here and think you can take Mrs. de Winter's place. You. You take my lady's place. Why, even the servants laughed at you when you came to Manderley. Even the little scullery-maid you met in the back passage there on your first morning. I wonder what Mr. de Winter thought when he got you back here at Manderley, after his precious honeymoon was over. I wonder what he thought when he saw you sitting at the dining room table for the first time."
"You'd better stop this, Mrs. Danvers," I said; "you'd better go to your room."
"Go to my room," she mimicked, "go to my room. The mistress of the house th
inks I had better go to my room. And after that, what then? You'll go running to Mr. de Winter and saying, 'Mrs. Danvers had been unkind to me, Mrs. Danvers has been rude.' You'll go running to him like you did before when Mr. Jack came to see me."
"I never told him," I said.
"That's a lie," she said. "Who else told him, if you didn't? No one else was here. Frith and Robert were out, and none of the other servants knew. I made up my mind then I'd teach you a lesson, and him too. Let him suffer, I say. What do I care? What's his suffering to me? Why shouldn't I see Mr. Jack here at Manderley? He's the only link I have left now with Mrs. de Winter. 'I'll not have him here,' he said. 'I'm warning you, it's the last time.' He's not forgotten to be jealous, has he?"
I remembered crouching in the gallery when the library door was open. I remembered Maxim's voice raised in anger, using the words that Mrs. Danvers had just repeated. Jealous, Maxim jealous...
"He was jealous while she lived, and now he's jealous when she's dead," said Mrs. Danvers. "He forbids Mr. Jack the house now like he did then. That shows you he's not forgotten her, doesn't it? Of course he was jealous. So was I. So was everyone who knew her. She didn't care. She only laughed. 'I shall live as I please, Danny,' she told me, 'and the whole world won't stop me.' A man had only to look at her once and be mad about her. I've seen them here, staying in the house, men she'd meet up in London and bring for weekends. She would take them bathing from the boat, she would have a picnic supper at her cottage in the cove. They made love to her of course; who would not? She laughed, she would come back and tell me what they had said, and what they'd done. She did not mind, it was like a game to her. Like a game. Who wouldn't be jealous? They were all jealous, all mad for her. Mr. de Winter, Mr. Jack, Mr. Crawley, everyone who knew her, everyone who came to Manderley."
"I don't want to know," I said. "I don't want to know."
Mrs. Danvers came close to me, she put her face near to mine. "It's no use, is it?" she said. "You'll never get the better of her. She's still mistress here, even if she is dead. She's the real Mrs. de Winter, not you. It's you that's the shadow and the ghost. It's you that's forgotten and not wanted and pushed aside. Well, why don't you leave Manderley to her? Why don't you go?"